Who was Le Corbusier?
Was he the father of modernist architecture – or the apostle of cold, concrete brutalism? Was he a prolific artist, visionary, and polemicist – or an autodidactic blowhard? Did he spawn new generations of enlightened architects – or scores of clueless copycats responsible for dull, fortress-like apartment and office complexes scattered across the globe? “Until now,” writes Nicholas Fox Weber, author of Le Corbusier: A Life, “there has been no substantial biography of Le Corbusier.” The architect responsible for much of the look of today’s urban landscape, the revered and reviled guru of modernism, has mainly been defined by his work. But here, Weber uses a treasure trove of the architect’s letters to paint a detailed and often disturbingly inhuman portrait of the man known as “Corbu.” At 800 pages, it is a detailed, illuminating read. But those mostly interested in the architect’s art will need to look elsewhere. What Weber delivers is Le Corbusier the man – gifted, vain, combative, in
Nicholas Fox Weber has had the run of the Fondation Le Corbusier, read and seen everything, including materials unavailable previously, and gives us so much of what we need, but his biography contradicts Corbusier’s self-assessment, by and large, only in matters of fact, which are merely incidental to his reputation. Le Corbusier, a Life, though it is threaded with a good many well-placed small illustrations, is not particularly visual, especially when the author sets himself to experience the architecture. But Phaidon published, very nearly concurrently, Le Corbusier Le Grand, a giant album of pictures (700-some pages and 2000 illustrations, with a separate hardbound English translation of selected French documents, in the same slipcase), ranging from personal snapshots to every kind of illustration of architecture, plans, drawings, paintings and sculpture, to original correspondence reproduced large enough to read. The two publications are pretty nearly complementary, one decidedly o
